I have no tagline.

Because I haven’t had the time nor energy recently to actually contribute genuine content; and because it’s still fun:

The Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: -5.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.33

Contrast this with last year’s results: My PC 2008. I imagine that a single person would have a non-negligible variation even from day to day, but now I’ll have to retake this next year to see if I’m exhibiting any kind of trend (relative to global trends?).

There are various issues at work here. For one, I really don’t like the word “blog”. I think it’s ugly. I would probably classify that as a relatively minor point, if forced, but still sort of annoying. The trouble is I seem to have this overly idealized love-hate thing going on with the internets. The tremendous availability of information and the corresponding democracy of information (aided of course by the search engines and other tools that help organize it) is astounding and fantastic. The connectivity and social structures and overall power of organization afforded by the internet is nothing short of amazing. The fact that any single person can potentially participate or contribute to the cyber frenzy is wonderful, frankly. There’s something deeply human about the desire to have a voice, to be heard, to participate and be acknowledged within a society of other people, whatever it may be. I appreciate that fact. And I appreciate that the internet provides a means to have these needs met in ways never before possible. This is, of course, the ideal. This is what the internet represents. Enormous potential. This is what I often marvel over and love about the internet.

And then there’s the reality: that the internet is full of worthless babble and pr0n, primarily, followed by (in no particular order) advertising, whiny emokids, dancing babies, lolcats, and the largest experiment ever conducted en masse on the long term effects of narcissism, code named the “blogosphere”. There’s useful information out there, sure, but a comparatively minuscule amount, stored mostly on the wikipedia servers. Herein lies a large part of my internal struggle, in moments of rose-colored wonder I think, “I like to write. I have things to say. I should publish my thoughts on the internet!” to which my super-ego almost immediately replies, “and avoid doing the work right here in front of you in favor of what? contributing to the worthless babble?” (The self-referential hypocrisy here is a little dizzying, I know.) To which some fragment of my psyche usually says, “Nooo! Shut up.” while some other little voice decides to settle the whole problem by resolving to only post useful information on the internet, thereby making me feel better while effectively ensuring that I never post anything. I can’t tell you how often this has happened. No, really.